Eslanda Robeson and cold war politics

On 7 July 1953, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson walked confidently into Room 357 of the Senate Office Building in Washington DC to provide testimony to the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operation, headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. She wore a dark suit and black hat with a thin half-veil accented with velvet dots. Essie looked a bit like a stylish mourner, but her demeanour was more gutsy than grief-stricken. She was angry and wholly unapologetic. Even though people she knew were being threatened and jailed for their politics, Essie was undaunted. ‘All I ever feared were cats’, she once declared. But the stakes were high. For Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a communist couple convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, had been executed just two weeks earlier despite their insistence they were innocent and a huge international protest. Others were being blacklisted and deported. I was ‘working very hard on an article about Mau Mau, when the McCarthy Senate Investigating Committee ordered me to appear’, she said in a statement reprinted by the Associated Negro Press. ¹ She had ostensibly been summoned because her books, copies of which appeared on shelves of US government libraries around the world, were alleged to be un-American. Her marriage to Paul Robeson was clearly also of concern.

Essie relished the opportunity to confront McCarthy directly. She sparred with the committee members from the start. ‘Did you write this book all by yourself?’ asked McCarthy staffer G. David Schine, holding up her book African Journey. ‘All by myself’, she replied, mocking the ridiculousness of the question. ‘I really think that is a very insulting question. I am quite capable of writing a book. I did write this book all by myself.’ ² Schine backed off.

Claiming protection under both the Fifth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, Essie refused to answer direct questions about whether or not she was a member of the Communist party. While the Fifth Amendment protects citizens against compelled self-incrimination, she was making an additional point by invoking the Fifteenth, which guarantees voting rights regardless of race. When the Committee told her she could not invoke the Fifteenth Amendment, Essie gave it a history lesson. ‘As a Negro and as a second-class citizen,’ she lectured, ‘I have been fighting racial discrimination all my life. As a Negro, I know a lot about the force and violence used against my people in this country.’ ³ When told that race had nothing to do with the hearings and that the Senate committee was all white as a result of voters’ choices, not racism, Essie snapped, ‘Most Negroes are in the South, sir, and they don’t have much right to elect senators.’ ⁴

The committee grilled her: why had she sent her son to a Soviet school? Did she know communists? Had she been to a communist cell meeting and, if she had, were people plotting to overthrow the government by force? What did she think of the conflict in Korea? What did her husband think about communism and the Soviet Union? The questions went on and on, but Essie did not waver. She insisted she knew little about communism, ‘except what I read in the papers and hearsay’. ⁵ She answered questions with questions: ‘Why don’t you ask [Paul]?’ she quipped, in response to questions on his politics. By the end of the exchange, the senators were stumped. They had got neither information nor deference. McCarthy glared down at Essie as he brought the hearing to a close and said he had let her get away with too much. She might have been cited for contempt, he said, had she been a man, and wanted future witnesses to be more compliant.

The Black press applauded Essie’s performance and she was proud herself. Veteran Black reporter Alice Dunnigan described her as ‘cool, intelligent and confident’. Others praised her feisty courage and ‘clear-sighted’ stance against the committee’s intimidation tactics. ⁶ Her lawyer, Milton Friedman, who, with friend Thelma Dale Perkins, accompanied her to the hearing, recalled that he ‘went with much apprehension’, for Essie was a strongly independent woman who often spoke her mind regardless of consequences. In the event, she had been pointed, candid and careful, and did not rise to McCarthy’s bait. The outcome was good: no charges, no indictments, and no incriminating comments. Perkins, relieved, invited her to spend the evening at her parents’ home in a predominantly Black neighbourhood of Washington. ‘On this day of triumph, I could not conceive of her going back home [to New York] without some kind of celebration,’ Perkins recounted. ‘That afternoon Essie relaxed and enjoyed the visit with my parents and their neighbors as if she had known them all her life.’ The two women visited the Frederick Douglass historic home site nearby and stood on the front porch, ‘looking across the river at the Capitol where Essie had begun this eventful day’. ⁷

After her appearance, Essie spoke out vehemently in newspaper articles, public speeches and correspondence. She said that she was indeed critical of the US government, but that this did not make her a communist or any less of an American. As a self-aware Black woman, she argued, how could she not criticise the persistent racism she saw all around her? Radical activists and intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr to Ella Baker had framed their criticism of America in precisely the same way: a demand for America to realise its promise. Essie claimed she was a loyal Negro citizen, whose loyalty, if ‘somewhat battered’, was still intact. ⁸ She did not condemn communism or those who were actually party members; her gripe was with The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthy for making false accusations, censoring political beliefs and punishing political dissidents.

In a lengthy essay entitled ‘A Citizen’s State of the Union’, a response to Eisenhower’s State of the Union address, she called for relations with the Soviet Union to be ‘live and let live in this one world’. She pointed out the duplicity of advocating democracy and freedom abroad while suppressing oppositional views and tolerating racial inequality at home. ‘Our citizens are no longer free nor brave,’ she wrote, warning that ‘fear is spreading like a plague among our citizens. Fear of losing one’s job, home, education, fear of non-conforming, or of even being accused of non-conforming.’ ⁹ The real obstacles to racial progress were not communists or so-called subversives but power, lawlessness, selfishness, arrogance, ruthlessness and greed. ¹⁰

Essie was quick to praise other public figures who refused to be censored or intimidated, such as the Paris-based Black American performer Josephine Baker. When their paths first crossed in the 1920s, Essie had not been impressed by her, but that changed when Baker became an outspoken critic of racism and suffered government harassment as a result. ‘I feel Josephine Baker is a modern Negro heroine’, wrote Essie to Robert Hicks, a reporter for the Afro-American. ‘All that talent, all that glamour, all those gorgeous clothes – and courage too. I’ll bet her knees are beautiful, especially so because she does not live on them.’

Even more significant was her support of Communist party leader Ben Davis, a friend of both Essie and Paul. In 1949 Davis, a Black Harvard-trained lawyer and onetime New York City councilman, was jailed for five years under the Smith Act, a 1940 federal law that prohibited participation in any group that advocated the overthrow of the government. In 1952, Essie had written an article for Freedom in which she defended Davis. ¹¹ And in 1954 she wrote the foreword to a booklet by Claudia Jones entitled Ben Davis, Fighter for Freedom which she opened with the words ‘Ben Davis is in prison now because he has the courage of his convictions, I can’t imagine a better reason to go to prison.’ ¹²

McCarthyism was, she felt, dividing and weakening the Black freedom struggle in the United States and convincing activists to turn away from the rest of the world and each other. ‘Our fight for civil rights is part of a worldwide civil rights fight’, Essie reminded a crowd at a picnic and rally held by the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born in Wanaque, New Jersey. In her opinion, the government’s indictment of the 83-year-old African American intellectual and spokesman W. E. B. Du Bois, alleging he was a foreign agent for daring to speak against US foreign policy and colonialism, was a particularly low blow. ¹³ When the charges against Du Bois were eventually dropped in November 1951, Essie was to write in the Afro-American that the government ‘in its arrogance, made the mistake of picking on the wrong Negro’. She applauded that Black and progressive whites had rallied to Du Bois’s defence, but added that the very fact that the attack had occurred was evidence that ‘the bulk of the Negro people had been asleep at the switch too long’. She linked Du Bois’s unjust treatment at the hands of the FBI to the treatment that many Black people had received for being ‘uppity’; the nature of racism was to ‘cut down’ those who tried to stand up.

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Essie Robeson was a part of the Black Atlantic world. She traversed the rough waters of the Atlantic more than a dozen times by boat and many more times by air: from New York to Ghana to London to Cairo and Cape Town and back again. And in the process of talking, working, arguing, making friends, listening, she synthesised that amalgam of experiences and local histories into her own hybrid Black identity, which was at the same time a political identity. She became a ‘race rebel’, fighting simultaneously for ‘the race’ and the working class across many national borders. ¹⁴ Initially with wild optimism and later with sober realism, she believed in and fought for the Third World project (the multilingual global tribe of have-nots in protest against the rigid binary of the cold war world) as a matter of principle and as a gesture of solidarity. She studied, internalised and made her own the struggles of Indians, South Africans, Chinese, Guyanese and Congolese. And Essie, though she eschewed the term ‘feminist’, anticipated, in her refusal to dissect the entangled issues of exploitation, racial subjugation and gender oppression, contemporary Black feminist theories of intersectionality. For her the relationships between capitalism, sexism, colonialism, racism and empire were symbiotic. Women were half the population and should wield half the power.

As much as she was Mrs Robeson, Essie remained her own woman. Pursuing an independent career as a writer, activist and scholar, travelling on her own to Asia, Africa, central America and the Caribbean, she used her title as Mrs Paul Robeson to open doors, but once those doors opened, a smart, pragmatic and fiercely independent woman walked through them. If we situate her not as a marginal subject, but the centre point from which to view the four and a half decades that followed the first world war, she was a kind of alternative Zeitgeist. She mixed with the literary and artistic luminaries of New York, London and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; developed friendships with independence leaders of Africa; was on first name terms with heads of state; stood side by side with anti-fascist fighters from Madrid to postwar Berlin; was at the founding of the United Nations; befriended the Nehru and Pandit families in India; witnessed not only the McCarthy witch-hunts but later the growing of the Black Freedom movement. Essie had a unique relationship with history – from war zones to the advent of new nations, from the treacherous waters of the Congo to the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria and the opulent dining room of the Kremlin.